The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

June 14, 2012

Danielle Collobert

Danielle Collobert [France}

1940-1978

Born in
Rostrenen, Côtes-d'Amor on July 23, 1940, French poet and journalist Danielle
Collobert lived out the war in her grandparents' house, since her mother, a
teacher was forced to live in a nearby village. Both her mother and her aunt
were part of the French Resitance.

Collobert attended the university, but in 1961 abandoned her studies,
joining the staff of Galerie Hautefeuilled in Paris. There she begin writing
her work, Meurtre, and self-published
Chants des Guerres (War Songs), years
later destroying any remaining editions of the book.

Collobert was involved in the National Liberation Front, involving
herself in several missions in Algeria. After a self-imposed exile in Italy,
she returned, collaborating with the magazine, Révolution Africaine.

After the publishing house Les Éditions
de Minuit rejected her book Meurte,
noted author Raymond Queneau interceded on her behalf with the publisher Gallimard,
which published the work in 1964.

In 1968 she joined the Writers' Union, traveling to then Czechoslovakia
during the Soviet backlash to "Prague Spring." From 1970 on she
continued to travel, writing new works such as Survie (Survival), which was first translated into Italian before
being published in France in 1978.

Three months after its publication, Collobert committed suicide on her
birthday in Paris. In the hotel room where she killed herself was found a small
notebook which she was writing at the time. Notebooks,
1956-1978 was published in English, translated by Norma Cole, by Litmus
Press in 2003.